Please visit Jessica's Journal for it's new blog location. Thank you for the visits.

New Year Eve was a pretty nice night for me. I had Pork Knuckles and a variety plate of sausages at a German restaurant with friends. After dinner, we went back home to play 3D Monopoly game until midnight. We watched fireworks from our balcony and managed to capture 2 major fireworks and 4 mini fireworks. I would say One Utama mall had a much better fireworks than the Curve mall for the year. We continued our monopoly game and chit-chats until 3am. I went to bed about 4am.

I drove all the way down to Wisma Genting, Jalan Sultan Ismail to collect my HP Virtual Tech Museum Gallery Contest Prizes. It was an easy drive and I reached my destination in about 30 minutes. However, I was lucky enough to get a Visitor parking as I was informed later that the Visitor parkings would not be available after lunch time. After meeting the Contact Person, signed the Goods Received forms and had my photo taken for HP purposes, I left the place happily with my prizes about an hour later. I look forward in exploring my new gadgets.

Penang will extend its No Plastic Day campaign for 3 consecutive days in a week, ie. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 1st. January 2010 onwards. Currently, the No Plastic Day campaign runs on Monday which had started in July 2009. I experienced the no plastic day at Watson shop in Beijing, China and Borders bookstore in Melbourne, Australia in recent months. Customers were required to pay for the plastic bags. Like in China and Australia, I think it is a good move but with one condition, ie. the local hypermarkets and shops need to allow customers to bring their own backpacks or bags into the premises.

I received the official letters from HP (Hewlett-Packard) on my HP Virtual Tech Museum Gallery Contest Prizes. I look forward to collecting the prizes on the 4th of December from Hill & Knowlton office (HP's appointed PR agency) at Wisma Genting, Jalan Sultan Ismail, Kuala Lumpur.

The Law of Navigation by John C. Maxwell can be easily illustrated in a Treasure Hunt competition. The team that wins normally possess a good navigator who can navigates the team members to the correct clues and destinations. Hence, a great leader needs the Law of Navigation instinct to lead a team. As the saying goes, almost everyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course.

Like many concern IT professionals, I am eager with Oracle future plan on Sun products after it's acquisition announcement on 20th April 2009. After nearly 6 months, both companies still remain as 2 separate entities. Hence, lots of unanswered quesitons popping up in the air. As a result, Oracle issued an Overview and FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) document to address the market concerns. Here are some of the extractions from the document:

Delivering increased investment and innovation in Java
Oracle plans to accelerate investment in the Java platform for the benefit of customers and the Java community. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and the Java platform is one of the industry’s most widely deployed technologies. Oracle has been a leader in the Java community since the inception of the Java programming language and already has the world’s largest investment in the Java platform, which provides the foundation for its Oracle Fusion Middleware products and its next-generation enterprise applications. Oracle plans to not only broaden and accelerate its own investment in the Java platform, but also plans to increase the commitment to the community that helps make Java an ubiquitous, innovative platform unified around open standards.

What are Oracle’s plans for the GlassFish Enterprise (Java EE) Server after the transaction closes?
Oracle plans to continue evolving GlassFish Enterprise Server, delivering it as the open source reference implementation (RI) of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specifications, and actively supporting the large GlassFish community. Additionally, Oracle plans to invest in aligning common infrastructure components and innovations from Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to benefit both Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server customers.

What are Oracle’s plans for NetBeans?
Oracle has a strong track record of demonstrating commitment to choice for Java developers. As such, NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle’s strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle’s next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.

What are Oracle’s plans for MySQL?
Oracle plans to spend more money developing MySQL than Sun does now. Oracle expects to continue to develop and provide the open source MySQL database after the transaction closes. Oracle plans to add MySQL to Oracle’s existing suite of database products, which already includes Berkeley DB, an open source database. Oracle also currently offers InnoDB, an open source transactional storage engine and the most important and popular transaction engine under MySQL. Oracle already distributes MySQL as part of our Enterprise Linux offering.

What is Oracle’s plan for OpenOffice?
Oracle has a history of developing complete, integrated, and open products, making integration quicker and less costly for our customers. Based on the open ODF standard, OpenOffice is expected to create a compelling desktop integration bridge for our enterprise customers and offers consumers another choice on the desktop. After the transaction closes, Oracle plans to continue developing and supporting OpenOffice as open source. As before, some of the larger customers will ask for extra assurances, support, and enterprise tools. For these customers we expect to offer a typical commercial license option.

How does Oracle support open source?
Oracle has long been committed to developing, supporting, and promoting open source. Oracle has been, and continues to be, committed to offering choice, flexibility, and a lower cost of computing for end users. Oracle has invested significant resources in developing, testing, optimizing and supporting open source technologies such as Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, and InnoDB. Oracle continues to embrace and offer open source solutions as a viable choice for development and deployment. More information about Oracle’s support of open source can be found at
oracle.com/opensource.